DURING his long and distinguished career the broadcaster, author and journalist Alistair Cooke delivered no fewer than 2,869 editions of his Letter from America, for the BBC. The series had begun in 1946 and covered every conceivable aspect of life in his adopted country before he broadcast his final letter, in 2004, shortly before his death at the age of 95.
The weekly letters reached a global audience.“No pleasure in work well done, in a lifetime of journalism, can compare with the evidence that comes in from the mail when you have done a talk that touched the hearts and minds of a bus driver in Dorset, a Judge in Canberra, a student in Bombay, a housewife in Yorkshire, a space scientist in Sri Lanka, a high school teacher in Peking, a nurse in Libya”, Cooke said in 1990 while giving a lecture (photographed by Stuart Paterson) at Glasgow’s RSAMD.
In March 1967 he had arrived in the city (main image) before delivering ‘The Jet Age and the Habits of Man’, the ninth Macmillan Memorial Lecture, at the Institution of Engineers and Shipbuilders in Scotland.
Salford-born Cooke had been in his late twenties when, in 1936, he began broadcasting a radio series, A London Letter, from the UK to the US, for the NBC network. He emigrated to the States the following year, and eventually established what became known as Letter from America.
For decades he reported on US affairs for The Guardian; his words were often carried in the Glasgow Herald. He presented a hugely successful TV series, Alistair Cooke’s America, and the accompanying book, one of many he wrote, sold almost two million copies.
Read more: Alistair Cooke obituary in The Herald, 2004
One of his most vivid radio despatches was an account of the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, in June 1968.
“Last Tuesday night, for the first time in 30 years”, he said, “I found myself by one casual chance in a thousand on hand, in a small narrow serving pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, a place that I suppose will never be wiped out of my memory as a sinister alley, a Roman circus run amok, and a charnel house”.
Suddenly, “there was ... a banging repetition of a sound that, I don’t know how to describe, not at all like shots, like somebody dropping a rack of trays. Half-a-dozen of us were startled enough to charge through the door, and it had just happened ...
“The only light was the blue light of three fluorescent tubes, slotted in the ceiling. But it was a howling jungle of cries and obscenities and flying limbs and two enormous men ... piling on to a pair of blue jeans [of the assassin].
“There was a head on the floor, streaming blood, and somebody put a Kennedy boater under it and the blood trickled down like chocolate sauce on an iced cake ...
“Down on the greasy floor was a huddle of clothes and staring out of it the face of Bobby Kennedy, like the stone face of a child lying on a cathedral tomb”.
Read more: Herald Diary
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